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Yet the single-mindedness of Cio- ran's despair is the engine of his humor. Since everyone is going to hell in a handbasket, there's no point in getting worked up about any particular case. Things slide by; get their ironic com- ment, almost always smart, occasionally I brilliantly funny: "Know thyself One has never heard expressed so briefly what it is to be damned." On the other hand, the ,universality of his despair makes him think that he knows it all already, and therefore doesn't have to look around to see what might be new. Although his notebooks, only recently published, are in many respects his best work, even they exist in a surprising void of particulars. Things do happen: he goes to the Louvre, he walks at night, once in a while he vis- its the theatre, and always, always he lis- tens to Bach. ("Of the things that have happened to me on earth, meeting Bach is the most important," he wrote, and "When I hear Bach, I believe.") But, apart from music, the things of the world are perceived but not really expe- rienced. What is felt is not the facts of life but fixed ideas about existence. There are neither motorcars nor cafés nor jet planes nor Algeria nor even movies-a single saxophone alone can be found, wailing, on page 279 of the notebooks. (And then, perhaps, he was thinking of the late-nineteenth-century symphonic saxophone, not of Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins.) What the completeness of despair gains for Cioran in insouciance it loses for him in moral seriousness. He can't look hard at a problem; he just switches the sentences around. He returned to the subject of the Jews, for instance, in the "Précis," but the approach is ex- actly the same as it was before the war, with the moral plus and minus signs me- I chanically altered. Postwar, the Jews are, byvirtue of their isolation, still Different, the Other, but now it is their Difference, their Otherness, their resistance to as- similation, that makes them great. "To be called a deicide is the most flattering insult that can be addressed to an indi- vidual or a people." They remain an ob- ject of metaphysical inquiry rather than just people. His admirers would like to insist that his infatuation with irration- alism was purged by the experiences of the war. But he didn't see Auschwitz and despair. He despaired as a way of not see- ing Auschwitz. If existence itself is poi- soned, if modern civilization in all its forms is headed toward the apocalyptic, if all of us are implicated in the suicide of the species, then the details of who, ex- actly, killed whom, when, and why are the banal preoccupation of bourgeois moralists. What really strikes the reader of Cio- ran is the essential continuity between the two ends of his work, young and old. The cult of the irrational can run only faster than reason or slower than life. It can try to outpace the quotidian rhythm of the world, with its doubts and nuances and scruples and compromises, and insist, as Cioran did at first, that all we need is change, revolution, tran for- mation, an ecstasy of destructive vitalit)r. Or it can retreat into a passive position of resignation, as Cioran did afterward: nothing ever changed, nothing ever will. Yet, if Cioran is not a thinker of con- sequence, his place as a major writer seems fairly won. His genius was not argumentative but dramatic. What is touching and funn)!, and most appealing in Cioran is not the originality of his thought but the way that, right under the smooth French aphoristic surface, one feels an anxious comedian at work. Nonexistence can become as tangible as a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens,just one of the things you face each day. Even if Cioran's history is dubious, his wisdoms limited, and his tempera- ment often too meanly quenùous, the gaiety of his despair is somehow heart- ening. One of his admirers calls him our "guide to the void." But a void, by its nature, won't have details, and there- fore won't have a map. All you can do is send off flares in the darkness. Cioran does that, even if sometimes the flares look suspiciously like fireworks-flu d'artiftces, as the nice French phrase has it. He was the last literary figure in the line that descends from Baude- laire, the last to walk the streets of Paris with the yearnings and some of the pu- rity of purpose of an ornery hermlt- saint. These days, without his kind, the city can seem asleep..